by John Dunning
“Really?” I said in my most-interested voice. “How long were you in?”
“It was only ten days. My paper made it a frontpage embarrassment for them and they were glad enough to see me go. I might still be there, though, if they hadn’t gotten their information from someone else.”
“That’s okay, ten days is long enough. At least you know the taste of it.”
“The taste, the smell, the color. It colors your whole life. But I’ll go back again before I let them make me betray…even you.”
“Hey, I believe you. In a funny way, though, it makes what I’m trying to do more difficult.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not quite ready to go on the record yet. But I can’t even explain the situation to you off the record without handing you a piece of my legal jam.”
“What kind of legal jam?”
“There was a crime done tonight. A bad one.”
“Did you do it?”
“No, ma’am, I did not.”
“Then…”
“I did some other stuff, stupid stuff that will not make them love me. If the cops don’t love you, you need something in your corner besides a motive, the means, and no alibi. You’d look good in my comer. But you need to know the risks.”
Warily, she said, “Can you tell me in general terms what happened?”
“Generally speaking, two people got killed. I’ve been busy all night destroying evidence and obstructing justice. They’ll almost certainly charge me with that, but at least I can bail out on it. That’s my magic word right now, bail . I have this compelling need to be out. I’ve got to be out.” I let a long pause emphasize that point for me, then I said, “But over the last two hours I’ve come to realize that the magnitude of my fuckup may make that impossible. I’ve got a growing hunch they might start taking my measurement for the murder rap.”
She let out her breath slowly, through her nose. I saw a slight shiver work its way across her shoulders.
“That’s it in a nutshell,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out how to handle it. I need to do that before I can get into the story or tell you what I want from you.”
“I don’t think it’s a problem. I’m not legally obligated to tell the police what you tell me.”
“I can see a situation, though, where they’d call you in and ask some questions you’d rather not answer.”
“I’ll claim privilege.”
“And end up in jail again.”
“Maybe I’ll take that chance, if the story’s worth it.”
“The story’s worth it. But between the two of us, we may still have to dig for the end of it.”
She looked out into the rainy street, just now awash with the palest light of morning. I floated a hint of what I hoped she could do for me.
“I’m hoping you know a great cop in this town, or a DA with a real head on his shoulders. The closer you’d be to such an animal the better.”
“I’m not sleeping with anybody right now,” she snapped. “If I was, I sure wouldn’t use him that way.”
“You’re touchy as hell at five o’clock in the morning, aren’t you? You should learn to sleep better.”
“Janeway, listen to me. You and I may become the best of pals, but we won’t get to first base if you keep dropping insults on my head.”
“And we’ll never get anywhere if you’re one of those politically correct types who takes offense at everything. I’m no good at walking on eggs. Do you want to hear what I meant or sit there and be pissed off?”
“Tell me what you meant, maybe I’ll apologize later.”
“I may need to turn myself in. If I do, all this is a moot point, you can do anything you want with it. But I’d at least like to be talking to my kind of cop, not one of those tight-asses who thinks the first mistake I made happened way back in Denver, when I quit the brotherhood.”
She didn’t say anything.
“The Rigby girl’s gone. I have good reason to believe that the killer may have taken her. I want to be out looking for her: I need to be looking, I really can’t overstate that. I will come totally unzipped sitting in a jail cell. All humility aside, I’m still the best cop I know. I’m not saying Seattle will give her a fast shuffle, but I know how it is in these big departments, I know how many cases those boys have to clear. I’m here, I’m focused, I’m looking for Eleanor, and I’ll open all the doors.”
I took a deep breath, which became a sigh. “But I’m far from home, I’m being slowly driven crazy by this rain, and I know nobody here but you. The cop in me wants to tear up this town looking for her, but I’m not even sure yet where the doors are. And if that kid winds up dead and the real cops could’ve prevented it while I’m out playing policeman…”
We looked at each other.
“I’ll tell ya, Trish, I’d find that damn near impossible to live with.”
She answered my sigh with one of her own, but it was a long time coming. “You want it both ways. It can’t be done.”
“If it can’t be done, I go in—no arguments, no questions. Her welfare is the first priority.”
“Maybe you should go in. Can you really do her any good out here by yourself?”
“I might surprise you. I really was a decent cop. With me looking too, her chances would have to go up. I don’t know, I’ve got to try. But there isn’t much time.”
I droned on, summarizing the immediate problem. The cops had to be told about Rigby now, this morning, before they closed down the scene. In a homicide investigation, every minute wasted on the front end is critical. I looked at my watch: I had already blown three hours.
“Let’s make it very clear, then, what you want from me and what kind of restraints I’m under,” she said. “As it stands now, I can’t even ask the cops an intelligent question.”
“That’s why I was hoping you knew somebody.”
“That I was sleeping with the chief of police, you mean. Sorry, Janeway, no such luck. I don’t drink with them or eat lunch with them, I don’t backslap or schmooze or let them tell me dirty jokes. My relationship with these guys is respectable but distant. It’s extremely professional and I’ve taken some pains to keep it that way.”
“Do you know anybody on the paper who does schmooze with them?”
“Nobody I’d trust, and I’d be wary of any cop such a guy might bring me. I don’t like reporters who party with people they write about.”
We thought it through another stretch of quiet.
She said, “I feel like I’m playing pin the tail on the donkey, or a card game with half a deck.”
“You want to hear the story, I’ll tell you the story.”
“Sure I want to hear it, isn’t that why we’re here? I’ll take it any way you want to tell it, on the record or off.”
I told it to her with no more clarification than that. I took her from Slater’s arrival in my bookstore through my hasty retreat from Pruitt’s house three hours ago. She asked nothing and made no judgments until it was finished. Her eyes darted back and forth as if she’d been replaying parts of it in her head.
“God, I’ve got more questions now than I had at the beginning. I know who Slater is, but who is Pruitt? Is this really about a Grayson book or is something else at the bottom of it? What happened to the kid who was tagging along with the fat man? And you…oh, Janeway, what on earth possessed you and what’re you thinking now? Do you think Pruitt lost his mind, killed his friends, and took off with Rigby? Does that make sense to you?”
“All I know for sure is there were five people, counting Eleanor. Only two are accounted for and they’re dead.”
“And what about that record playing? What do you make of that?”
“She was being stalked and harassed on the phone. It had to’ve been Pruitt, that’s obvious now. He was her darkman, her worst nightmare.”
“But why leave the record playing, at home, with a dead man there?”
The check came. I made a stab at it but sh
e was quicker. She looked through her purse and fished out a twenty.
“I’m going on up to the scene,” she said. “At least then we’ll know what cops are working it. Maybe I can take them off the record and get them to tell me something.”
We walked out in the rain. I stood beside her car, getting wet again, and talked to her through the narrow crack at the top of her window.
“I’ll be holed up in my room at the Hilton. You call me.”
“As soon as I can.”
“Sooner than that. Remember, I am not calm, I’m not taking this in my stride. I am very nervous.”
“I hear you.”
“You call me, Trish. The minute you can get the smell of it and break away, you get on that phone.”
“I’ll call, but don’t get your hopes up. I think you’re gonna have to go in to get what you want. And the cops won’t be naming you citizen of the year.”
22
I stood under a hot shower, put on dry clothes, lay on the bed with the TV low, and waited uneasily.
She called just before eight.
“The cops on the case, Quintana and Mallory…I know them both, not well, but maybe enough to give you a reading. It’s not good news.”
“Of course not,” I said, sitting up on the bed.
“You might be able to talk to Mallory if you could get him alone. But it wouldn’t do much good, he’d take it all to Quintana anyway.”
“It’s pretty hard to hold out on your partner.”
“And then Quintana would be running it, and your troubles would just begin. Mallory’s the weak sister in this Mutt-and-Jeff show: you can’t ask him about the weather with Quintana in the same room—you ask him a question and Quintana answers it. Quintana’s an overriding presence, extremely inhibiting. He is tough, intelligent to the point of being cunning, and damned condescending to women and other small animals. I don’t think he’d look at a former cop with much sympathy. People call him supercop, and not all of them mean it the way he’d like to think.”
There’s one in every department, I thought. I’d had one for a partner myself, before Hennessey. It didn’t last long. Steed had had to split us up to keep us from killing each other.
The prognosis was obvious. Grimly I moved on to the next round of questions. Had the cops been able to make the Rigby connection from the “Rigby” record?
“I haven’t been able to get into that with them. They’re just not open with stuff like that, and everybody’s wondering what I’m doing here anyway. I told you I don’t do breaking stories. We’ve got other people covering this, and I’m bumping into them every time I turn around.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“About the record?…I can’t see them linking it.”
I lost my temper, probably because I couldn’t see them linking it either. “Goddammit, who does Seattle put on these homicide jobs, Peter Sellers? What’s the matter with these fucking cops, what does it take to get their attention?”
“You asked me what I think and I told you. I could be wrong. But I think they’ll figure the record as noise, to cover up what was happening in that house. The music will go right past them. A million people in this town like Beatles music—it might as well have been the Judds on that deck, or the Boston Pops. Why would the police think twice about ‘Eleanor Rigby’?”
“Because a woman by that name just went through their stupid nitwit court system!”
“You’re assuming the right hand knows what the left hand’s doing. In a system this big, you should know better. Anything’s possible: I just think it would take one brilliant cop or a stroke of luck for that to happen.”
I heard an emergency vehicle pass in her background, the siren fading as it went by on the way somewhere else.
“They’ll be putting a wrap on it soon,” she said. “Are you coming in?”
I thought of supercop. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Janeway…”
“I hear you. I’m just having a lot of trouble with it.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“What if I didn’t come in?”
“I think that would be a mistake.”
“What have I got to lose at this point, supercop’s gonna have my ass for breakfast anyway. They don’t need me, they’ve got you.”
“I think I’m still off the record. Did we ever get that straight?”
“If we did, consider it inoperative.”
“What do you want me to tell them?”
“Everything. Anything that helps them find Rigby. Tell them if they waste manpower looking for me, they’re a bunch of losers.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Start from ground zero, go till I drop.”
“Listen,” she said as if she had just made up her mind about something. “We need to talk some more. Don’t just disappear on me. Call me tonight.”
“I’ll see where I am then.”
“I know some stuff I didn’t tell you yet…things you need to hear. Will you call me?”
“I’ll try.”
“It’s important.”
We seemed to have reached the end. But she was reluctant to let me go.
“Cliff, is this really what you want?”
“No. But it’s what I’m going to do.”
23
How do you disappear in the other man’s town? I went about it step by step, covering my tracks, playing the odds, counting on what I knew of the supercop mentality to help me along. Aandahl would be getting back to the scene right about now, just as I was packing my stuff out of the Hilton and loading up in Eleanor’s trunk. She’d be starting to tell them now, as I turned into University and hit the freeway. She’d probably start out talking to the quiet one, Mallory: that was her nature, avoid the supercops of the world as long as possible. It wouldn’t be possible for long: Mallory would call in supercop as soon as he realized what he had…just about now, I thought. She’d be segregated in one of the rooms away from the investigation and they’d start on her slowly and work their way up to heat. She’d have to repeat it all, everything she’d told Mallory: supercop never settled for hearsay, even from a partner. Again Mallory would ask the questions and she would answer, and when it was time for the heat to come down, supercop would take over and see if she scared. Maybe she’d tell him where to shove it. I thought about her and decided she just might. It would take an hour off the clock for them to get to that point.
I found a bank that was open on Saturday, half-day walkup-window service. My paper trail would end here, it was cash-and-carry from now on. The paper I had already left would soon take them through Slater to the Hilton. Supercop would also know that I’d been driving an Alamo rental, but he’d be annoyed to find it disabled in the Hilton garage. How long a leap would it be until he had me driving Rigby’s car? It could be half a day or it might be done with two two-minute phone calls. A lot depended on luck—his and mine—and on how super the asshole really was.
I drew a $3,000 cash advance on my MasterCard. There was more where that came from, an untapped balance maybe half again as much. In the other pocket of my wallet I had a Visa, which I seldom used: the line of credit on that was $2,000. I never maxed out on these cards: I always paid it off and the jackals kept bumping my line upward, hoping I’d have a stroke of bad luck and they could suck me into slavery at 18 percent along with the rest of the world’s chumps. It was good strategy, finally about to pay off for them.
I took the cash in hundreds, two hundred in twenties. It made a fat wad in my wallet.
I stopped in a store and bought some hair dye, senior-citizen variety, guaranteed to turn me into a silver panther. I’d have to do it in two stages, bleach my dark hair white and then dye it gray with an ash toner. I’d be an old man till I dyed it back or it grew out. I bought a good grease pencil with a fine point and a hat that came down to my ears. I bought some sealing tape, shipping cartons, a marking pen, and a roll of bubblewrap. I doubled back toward
town. In the Goodwill on Dearborn I bought a cane and an old raincoat. For once in my life I left a thrift store without looking at the books.
I sat in the car with the windows frosting up and did my face. I gave myself a skin blemish under my right eye, added some dirty-looking crow’s-feet to the real ones I was getting through hard living, and headed out again. I looked at myself in the glass. It wasn’t very good, but maybe it didn’t have to be. All I needed now was to pass in a rush for an old duffer with the hurts, when I talked to the man at the check-in counter.
I chose a motel not far from the Hilton, the Ramada on Fifth just off Bell Street. I pulled my hat down and leaned into the cane as I walked into the lobby. For now I would be Mr. Raymond Hodges, a name I pulled out of thin air. I also pulled off a pretty good limp, painful without overdoing it. I gave a half-sigh, just audible with each step down on my right foot. The guy behind the desk didn’t seem to notice me beyond the bare fact of my presence, a sure sign that he had taken me at face value. There’s nobody in that room but an old guy who can barely walk , he’d tell anybody who wanted to know. It wouldn’t fool supercop if he got this far, but if they were checking around by phone, it might discourage them from coming out for the personal look.
It was still only midmorning: registration for the night wouldn’t be opening for another four or five hours, but the man let me in when I told him I was tired. The only thing that seemed to throw him momentarily was the sight of cash. In the age of plastic, a man with cash is almost as suspicious as a man with a gun.
For my own peace of mind, I had to get rid of Otto Murdoch’s books, and it was Saturday and the post office was on a banker’s schedule. In my room I sealed the books in the bubblewrap and packed them tight, with the other books I’d bought all around them. I sealed the boxes and addressed them to myself in Denver. I called the desk for directions and he sent me to the main post office at Third and Union. I insured the boxes to the limit—not nearly enough— and felt a thousand pounds lighter when they disappeared into the postal system.
The library was just a few blocks away, and I stopped there to look at a copy of The Raven . The most accessible Poe was the Modern Library edition, on an open shelf in the fiction section. I sat at a table and browsed it, looking for the words still and whisp , printed diagonally one above the other. I found them in the fifth stanza, partial words but strong as a fingerprint.
